


it disappeared from me from you

by meanderingsoul



Series: floors, walls and window sills [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bahrain, Bahrain is basically a whole set of warnings isn't it, Canonical Character Death, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Home, House Cleaning, Hurt No Comfort, Introspection, Loss, Married Couple, Past Character Death, Post-Season/Series 03, References to Depression, Suicidal Thoughts, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-25 22:13:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13844091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meanderingsoul/pseuds/meanderingsoul
Summary: Melinda needed to sell their house. She should sell the house.





	it disappeared from me from you

**Author's Note:**

> This is intended to take place between seasons three and four.

 

Melinda needed to sell their house. She should sell the house.

Her name was still on everything. Andrew had never changed the documents after the divorce.

Standing in their street felt like hallucinating. The trees were all bigger than she pictured them. That one yellow cat wasn’t on the porch two houses down. The Connelly’s blue car wasn’t across the street. Maybe they’d moved. The house across from theirs had been repainted. The old lady who’d lived there must be long gone. She’d always hated them anyway.

She stared up the steps. All the windows stayed dark. That was never how this used to go.

The mailbox was rusting at one corner. She kept glancing back at it. Andrew must have tried to touch up the paint at some point, but he was terrible at that kind of thing, smudgy bristle marks. She’d always fixed things around the house. She’d always helped her dad when she was young. It was habit.

They’d _saved_ for this place, gone from apartments well below their means to this. They’d paid off his student loans first, paid as much up front as they could. By the time she made level four it was decent money. The mortgage had been tiny. They were smart about it.

They’d moved in together almost a year before he proposed. She traveled so much it didn’t seem worth holding on to her place, even though the view had been nice. Having to stay near the University had limited their options quite a bit. The Cranbrook place really had been kind of a shitbox, the hot water quit sometimes and the oven was better as a heater than it was at making edible food.

The first time Phil had picked her up from there for work he’d asked, “Are you guys in hiding for something I don’t know about?” loudly over her shoulder and she’d body-checked him into the hallway wall while Andrew scowled at them both because that was their lives then and it all came naturally.

She picked the lock to their front door with practiced ease. Andrew had only locked the place when she wasn’t around.

There was a little airport half an hour away that waved through people with Shield badges because it was the nineties and things were different. Andrew drove her up to catch jumpseats into D.C. all the time, picked her up when quinjets dropped her off days later. It was a four hour bike ride to the D.C. offices if she didn’t speed. Coulson picked her up or dropped her off or carried her back up to the front door depending on how the mission went. One time Barton had hovered the helicopter so she could slide down a rope into somebody’s field and just hike those last few miles home. She’d always come home at odd times and from weird places, not always from where she’d left her keys.

When she’d first seen how little had been changed inside after Maui, how so many of their things were right where she’d left them when she’d left years ago, the cream paint she’d put on the walls, the couches they’d picked, her old stereo on a lower shelf she’d gone and hidden in the laundry room to cry.

After Bahrain she’d left with a single bag over her shoulder in the night like the criminal she was, like the _murderer_ she was, wheeling her motorbike three streets over before she rode away.

This had been home.

Melinda stood in the entryway a long time. The air was stale.

It could have been worse. There wasn’t much food spoiled in the kitchen. He’d said the transition made him feel ill. It was obvious he hadn’t really been eating for a long time before he was… The stupid blender Phil got them as a wedding gift was in the same spot on the counter where it had always been. They did smoothies for breakfast most of the time. Drew used to pick her up and set her on the countertop.

He’d done that after they’d decided to have a baby, pulled up her shirt to kiss her belly.

Melinda thought about sitting on their kitchen floor and screaming for a while but eventually she just… didn’t.

She walked through the house and out the back door without really seeing anything. There was a stain on the back porch where Phil had fallen asleep and dropped his sangria, one summer near his birthday. It’d been her fault anyway. She’d been bouncing pretzels off his sleepy face from where she and Andrew had been sat on the porch swing, his bare foot swaying them, his face turned into her hair while he watched fireflies.

She stalled out looking at the backyard.

She’d found the place because of this yard, for this big space, green grass and the ravine at the back edge that was dry most of the year and dense with trees. She could jump it if she wanted. Andrew refused to try. The flood insurance had been a bitch. The trees were old, cast a lot of shade. They’d planted juniper and ferns and butterfly weed, roughhoused in the torn-up dirt.

It hadn’t always been peaceful of course. They led weird lives. Andrew’d been here alone a lot of the time. Her commute was insanity, but it was smarter to set up a permanent residence near Culver and neither of them really liked D.C. They fought and made up. It was a life. It was her life.

By the time she blinked back to herself her legs were stiff and the sun was going golden around the edges of the house in the way she’d always loved.

She dialed her phone with clumsy fingers. It answered on the third ring like it always did.  

“He’s dead Māmā,” she said.

“I heard,” Mom replied flatly after a moment, “and Phillip called me.”

She ignored that. “I, I don’t know what to do with his things.”

Her mother sighed, faint sound through the phone. “Don’t rush when you don’t have to Melinda.”

“I understand,” she said because that was easier to offer than agreement or gratitude and she hung up before she did something awful like cry or ask Mom what the fuck she knew about this. Her and Dad had been out of love so long before the divorce Melinda still wasn’t sure what it could have even looked like.

It was still enough to make her walk back inside the house. She wasn’t Commander May anymore. She didn’t have to be back for several days. She didn’t have to do all of this right now.

She made herself look for traces of husk in the office first. There weren’t any. She wasn’t expecting to find anything. She hadn’t noticed anything out of place when she’d broken in here after the second day of silence.

The old couch was still under the window.

She remembered Nat on that couch talking quietly about cannibalism and not in theory while she listened from outside, remembered barging in on Drew with a patient by accident because she’d gotten called in and a quinjet was on the way and they’d had such a fight about it they’d barely spoken the whole week she was gone, remembered painting her toes on the phone with Phil or Barton or Maria while Andrew graded papers, remembered having sex with him on this couch in that student apartment he’d had when she’d met him.

She bagged everything rotten in the fridge and slept badly on the floor next to the couch.

The University was easy. Culver University understood weird. She still remembered working the Banner Incident.

Last time she’d driven herself over there had been for Skye. The time before that she’d gotten back from Hainan early and surprised him with lunch, making out on his office couch like teenagers until he had to open the door for office hours.

Professor Garner had been reported missing a few months ago and had now been found dead. They were going to hold a vigil or something. She hadn’t really listened by that point.

Someone else would move into his office and the department would reuse the things that had been his for over 15 years and in five more there wouldn’t be any students left here who remembered who Professor Garner was at all.

They’d filled the backyard with grad students almost a dozen times, that warm week before graduation. She’d even been home for most of them, for the mess of soda cans and beer bottles and pizza boxes and people finally introducing boyfriends or fiancés to Drew after months spent on research.

He’d never kept many personal things in his office. Just enough for two small boxes. Electronics cables, student files, personal books. The picture on his desk was one of her, an older one of her from years ago that he’d taken by their front door.

It always had been this picture. He must have never changed it when she left him.

Her hands shook putting it in the box.

She laid outside on the back porch that night on the glider, not-sleeping and listening for the owls, staring up at the fan that wasn’t even spinning.

She used to go running in the early morning misty neighborhood, wake him when she got back and threaten to shower without him. He’d be sleep-warm and groan at her when she jumped onto the bed. She had to cut her runs short when they went together, even with as much taller than her that he’d been, the endurance level was just too different. Andrew ran to keep fit. She ran because her body was a tool to maintain and required perfection.

She left to buy boxes and paper, spent the day boxing up things without looking too hard at any of it. She put all the boxes upstairs except his collection of books for psychology. Those Culver could have. She unplugged everything, cancelled all the utilities, filled a trash bin with all the half-used things you needed to take care of a house. Nobody needed them anymore.

Those four-day weekends or occasional week off she’d often ride in to work with him, people watch on the campus and get lunch together. Or she stayed home and worked on the house. Andrew always said it didn’t need to be worked on, but she was just better at it. And she liked mowing. At night she would chop things while he cooked dinner and told her whatever one of his undergrads had said that day.

Melinda put her stereo in a box and put it upstairs with all the rest.

She didn’t touch the bedroom.

She could still see the scratches in the wood frame around their bedroom door from her nails, a dent in the door of it he’d painted over but never hidden where Andrew had kicked it in because he thought she might kill herself.

They’d been so worried she was going to kill herself. It wasn’t like she hadn’t considered it at the time. She’d known she wasn’t any good to anyone now, but she hadn’t been in any hurry to get where she knew she was going and deserved to be. Still wasn’t.

She’d told him that night, after almost two weeks barely speaking, numb under the shrieking static in her head, him sleeping in the living room and calling her name from just inside the door when she dreamed and couldn’t wake up. She couldn’t cry, forgot to do PT. He’d had to yell her name to wake her, had risked reaching for her when she woke up and saw him. She saw how he blinked back tears when she thrashed away from him and had just given up, shoved him out of the room, locked the door, and crumpled to the floor behind it crying too hard to catch her breath.

She’d finally screamed it out against her legs _it was her it was her and I shot her I shot her I pulled the trigger and couldn’t even hold her until she was dead_.

Andrew’d finally given up on pleading with her or waiting her out and splintered the lock, sat down several feet away promising not to touch her, talking low and even but she really couldn’t hear his voice.

They’d stayed right there on the floor until dawn. She’d passed out at some point.

She’d only let herself cling on to all of this, to this life, a few more days after that.

Melinda should sell the house, but she knew she wasn’t going to.

She knew all the legalese to deal with the money. Vanished under classified circumstances didn’t start that process, but cremation sure did. She set up a new savings account, though she’d move that money somewhere governments couldn’t freeze as soon as she had a chance. She had no intention of touching it really. Some of it was hers, she hadn’t taken much when she left, but that didn’t matter. The insurance would go to his brother and sisters, the nieces and nephews whose birthday cards she’d used to sign. Andrew’s family had been big, affectionate, and bad at keeping in touch. Last thing they’d ever heard about her was that she’d left him in the night and filed for divorce.

Sitting in the bare living room she suddenly remembered him laughing, because he’d always thought it was hilarious what she did whenever a bug got in the house, because somehow her not wanting to just spray the damn thing was funny. She’d always just found it and crunched it herself and he’d just howl laughing about it.

Someday she’d probably forget that sound again, wouldn’t she.

Melinda still hadn’t gone in their bedroom. Still hadn’t opened the door.

“I want babies. Plural,” she’d said in the dark one night. “We’re not getting any younger.”

“I’d say speak for yourself, but…” he’d said, and she’d shoved him, laughing. “Are you serious?”

“We’re ready, aren’t we?” and the way he’d _kissed_ her…

She’d gotten her tubes tied two months after shooting Katya, hadn’t done it through Shield and hadn’t told anyone, gotten so drunk afterwards she’d been late to work in the morning, sobbing facedown on her bathroom floor both arms around her belly and stifling herself with a towel that should have really been laundry.

Level 3 administration May had that apartment in D.C. almost five years. It was nice enough. Small. Decent view. Empty except for a stupid futon and her clothes. Andrew’d never seen it and she’d never let anyone come inside.

After Maui, she’d been so worried when he went silent, when he wasn’t at home, when he wouldn’t text back, wouldn’t call, turned off his phone and she couldn’t find him.

But after a few days it became obvious he wasn’t going to turn up hurt somewhere. The University had heard from him. He’d used an ATM. She stopped checking John Doe descriptions. Only left one voicemail that pleaded.

Andrew was fine. He just wouldn’t speak to her or see her. She’d finally packed her bag and left the house in a haze without looking back. Again.

She’d really never dreamed he could hurt her like this, but, it wasn’t like she hadn’t had it coming.

Knowing the truth of it later really hadn’t helped at all.

Melinda stood in the entryway a long time. The air was stale. It was a little dusty. Things looked bare, the furniture just dark shapes, the bedroom door closed.

She locked the front door and walked away.

She didn’t look back this time either.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I thought of three of the lines in this story after watching season three. Months later here this is. It was hard to write. I am excited to finally share it. Melinda May is amazing and her life breaks my heart.
> 
> The next fic from me involving Andrew is probably going to be a lot less heavy. *cough philindrew threesome cough* After that I have two more stories involving him and I'll have said all the things I've needed to say about seasons 2 and 3.
> 
> Please throw angry tomatoes at me in the comments or tell me about all your tears <3 (Also go read the epilogue!)


End file.
